Google Code-in Check-in

We wanted to do a quick check-in on Google Code-in to let you know how the contest is going. We are just over four weeks into the contest – more than halfway. We’re quite excited about the participation thus far and hope more of you are planning to get involved in the coming days.
As of today we have more than 290 participants who have completed at least one task. There have been 813 tasks completed by all our student participants so far for a combined point total of 1,605. Points are calculated according to difficulty of the task: “Hard” tasks are worth 4 points, “Medium” tasks are worth 2 points, and “Easy” tasks are worth 1 point.
We’re also quite impressed with the international representation we’ve gotten from the contest – over 75% of our participants are from outside the United States. Our top 10 participating countries in order are: United States, Romania, Bulgaria, Russian Federation, Poland, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, and Belarus.
We would love to have more students participate! There are currently over 400 tasks that are unclaimed and need someone to work on them.
Remember, the contest ends on January 10, 2011. Don’t delay, claim a task today!

你好, नमस्ते and bonjour to better mobile web Gmail

There are many ways to get your Gmail on your phone. The mobile webapp version of Gmail (which you can get to by going to gmail.com in your browser) is the best way to get the most Gmail features on your iPhone or Android-powered device. Features such as search, stars, labels and threaded conversations all work in the mobile webapp just as they do in the desktop Gmail experience. Today, we’re bringing the latest version of our HTML5 webapp to 44 new languages.

Before today, this new version was only available for U.S. English, but we’re now expanding to Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and American), Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese (for both Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (for both Spain and South America), Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukranian, Urdu and Vietnamese.

If your phone’s default language is one of those listed, go to gmail.com in your phone’s browser and the new interface will appear in your language automatically. We’ve been rolling these changes out, so some of you may have already seen them. You’ll get a bunch of new goodies including offline support, smart links (titles will appear in links for Google Maps, YouTube and Google Docs), the ability to add and remove labels, layout improvements and more—in addition to the existing features like starring, better threaded conversations and search.

This new version works for iPhones running iOS 2.2.1 and above, and all versions of Android. Go to gmail.com in the browser of your iPhone or Android-powered device to try it out, and if you have any feedback, let us know in our forum.